Live and Let Die

I’ve never been one much for background music. I like to actually listen to music, rather than using it as wallpaper for a particular mood. I even actively listen to ambient music that is meant to be half ignored. That’s just how I am. In those places where some listen to background music, I prefer silence. Sweet, sweet silence.

Silence is awesome and all, but you can’t always get it. Sometimes you have to be around people and, as you may have noticed, people are always making noise. In these situations, it’s a relief to be able to overwhelm the sounds that you don’t control with the sounds that you do. Traveling is one such situation.

When you’re on a plane in the vicinity of a screaming kid, the possibility of reducing that noise to the level of just another instrument in a loud rock song is a huge comfort. Take that, child with discipline problems. Just you try to scream louder than David Yow. I dare you.

Actually, in these situations, I like to put on something ambient or at least atmospheric and make the real world around me into a movie, because like a movie, I know that even if I can’t exactly escape, at least there is the promise of entertainment–even if I have to do all the creative work. In a sense, these ambient songs are a soundtrack to my internal film.

You would think that an actual soundtrack would be the way to go for these times. Ambient music might be good, your reasoning goes, but something that is actually made for a movie, well, that would be even better. I’m here to tell you that you’re wrong.

The problem with actual soundtracks–and I’ve listened through a couple that were not of my choosing in the last few days–is that they force you to map your internal movie onto the one that corresponds to the soundtrack. So you could (hypothetically, of course) be eating dinner with a group of people while listening to James Bond’s greatest hits and instead of having an original scene in your movie, you get a pastiche of your movie with another which features Simon Le Bon warbling “A View to A Kill” while busty girls with guns run by. Now, ordinarily the busty girls with guns scene is a desirable one, but that kind of dramatic tension can ruin any good dinner conversation by inevitably calling attention to itself. And how are you supposed to enjoy fine French cheese while discussing the relative merits of Connery and Craig? I’m not sure that’s possible.